August 25, 2012

The distraught photographer, Louis Pagakis, told CTV Montreal that he did everything he could to save [30-year-old Maria] Pantazopoulos after she got into danger.

She had her wedding dress on and she said, ‘take some pictures of me while I swim a little bit in the lake,’ she went in and her dress got heavy, I tried everything I could to save her,” he told the station, visibly emotional....

'She was doing the photo shoot in about 6 inches or 1-foot of water when part of her wedding dress got soaked and became extremely heavy,' [police spokesman Sgt. Ronald[ McInnis told MailOnline.

She was found 100 feet from the photo spot, sunk to the bottom, dragged down by the wedding dress.

Now I know for a fact that I am a bad person and you must not comport with me, I will lock myself up for I laugh at the wrong things and at the wrong time. In my defense, though, "I tried everything I could to save her” + Superman t-shirt.

Common sense is very uncommon. Studying the past can help make up for some deficits. Take Percy Shelley's wife who managed to drown herself in London's (very shallow) Serpentine precisely because her waterlogged dress dragged her down. This was before crinolines--dresses weren't nearly as heavy as Victorian ones were later. Crinolines provide a counterexample: take Thackeray's wife who threw herself overboard on the trip between England and Ireland but didn't drown because her huge crinoline kept her afloat, bobbing like a cork, long enough for her to be seen and rescued.

The reporting of this is positively incoherent. So I don't know what to think. She was married in June but they refer to her husband as her fiance. One of the photo captions deep in the story refers to the woman as not having been named. The site is both "notoriously hazardous" and not perticulayly dangerous. She is simultaneously posing on a rock and in a foot of water. Maybe the rock was submerged but its not explicit. What gives!

Clothes get very heavy wet. Wedding dresses are usually fairly heavy even dry. The first thing they taught us to do as children if we were thrown in the water was to get our jeans *off* and use them as inflatable devices to float. Some of the current tech fabrics stay light when wet, but I always shake my head at the various movies showing people diving in deep water in denim and saving themselves or someone else - it's almost impossible to move.

I almost drowned in a similar way. I was on a film shoot and I went into the ocean to retrieve a wine bottle we had tossed in. Rip tide pulled me out. I'm a strong swimmer but I could not believe how far out I was, and how heavy my clothes were. I was swimming and swimming and swimming, and I knew I wasn't going to make it. Could not believe it. Felt really stupid. And then I swallowed some water and I was starting to panic.

And then I stopped swimming and tried to touch bottom. Got my foot on the ocean floor and I walked out.

I was lucky, I think.

My heart goes out to her husband, her whole family. That's a horrible way to die.

Hah. I always chuckle at those Sandals advertisements....the ones showing a bunch of people on the beach, swimming in the ocean, and the one you cite...jumping in to the ocean after getting married.

Balderdash. My daughter was married at Sandals in Nassau, in a three day extravaganza. Sandals there has a lovely beach....that nobody uses ... except for the photo ops. No one actually gets in the water....that I saw anyway. There are reasons for the huge swimming pools all Caribbean Sandals have right next to the ocean beech.

Those reasons are Requiem Sharks, which include Tiger, Bull and Blacktip sharks.

So I do a little googling and I find out that there is a Darwin awards website, a Darwin awards book, and a Darwin awards movie.

I have read that the creator of the website, Wendy Northcutt, is a Stanford molecular biologist.

The whole idea seems rather juvenile and callous. And name-dropping a famous scientist first doesn't actually make it any less juvenile or callous.

"Before (the awards became popular), we were an insular community and we could make fun of people and those people (or their families) would never find out. But as it got bigger, I realized there was more and more danger of really hurting people."

Kind of slow on the uptake for Stanford. Maybe callousness and high IQ go together? Reminds me of the obliviousness of the Ivy Leaguers who write about "free-floating fetal heads" and are only vaguely aware of any problems.

If you have a really high IQ, you're on the outskirts of humanity, anyway. When you combine that with a belief in your genetic superiority, it might be a problem. Are you laughing at inferior people who are dying? Okay. Might want to think about that a little.

I wager that within 1 year all wedding dresses will be required by law to have a warning label on them, just like that tag on the mattress- saying something like :"Do not attempt stupid swimming stunts while wearing the dress"

'She’s a really fun girl, and she just didn’t want her wedding dress sitting in a box in the closet.

So, instead of donating her dress to another poorer woman who couldn't afford such an extravagant dress or to a charity where someone else would have been trilled to wear a beautiful wedding dress.....she decides to destroy the hard work and beauty and just throw more money away in an already over the top and ostentatious ceremony.

I think it pretty ironic that the dress killed her before she could kill it.

"Jimbob, anonymous guy on the internet, yells 'Darwin!' at marriage, apparently because he has no idea how important reproduction is to Darwin."

Darwin was a scientist. The plankton and finches of his studies were not married.

The scientist realizes that marriage, copulation, cohabitation, companionship, breeding and child rearing are all independent states or activities, not one of them nowadays necessarily linked to any other.

The only thing definitely linked to marriage is divorce, and marriage and divorce differ from the other activities or states in that, among the animals, they are uniquely practiced by Man as a result of religion and superstition.

Jimbino ...The scientist realizes that marriage, copulation, cohabitation, companionship, breeding and child rearing are all independent states or activities, not one of them nowadays necessarily linked to any other.

Hogwash. "Marriage", as legally defined, is a Homo Sapiens Sapiens construct. Okay. Given that, remove that word from your statement relative to life activities, and you have again demonstrated you know nothing about mammalian wild life, or human life, let alone scientific knowledge of their activities and the relationships therein. How do you do it and keep a straight face?

regarding "The scientist realizes that marriage, copulation, cohabitation, companionship, breeding and child rearing are all independent states or activities, not one of them nowadays necessarily linked to any other."

Interesting exam question; here I spell out the independence, in the case of sapient Homos, for you and the other non-scientist commenting here:

marriage alone: "sham marriage" for pay, recognized in law by the INS

copulation alone: called a "one-night stand," even though one of the partners has traditionally thought conversation a desirable part of it.

cohabitation alone: called "roommates"

companionship alone: called "friendship"

breeding alone: called single motherhood by IVF

child rearing alone: called "foster parenting"

Actually, if you read Jane Goodall, you will find examples among her Chimpanzees of each of these, except for IVF motherhood, for obvious reasons. What really separates sapient Homos from Chimpanzees is the superstition and religion of the Homos.

Jimbino ... you need to do more more first hand field research of animal behaviors and read less on the work of others, which you do not understand. Your claim to be a scientist, if in a field even slightly related to animal life, is pure fraud. Simple as that.

If you have a science background I suspect it might be Chemistry or Physics. I started out in Chemistry and you sound like one trying to presume one field convey omnibus expertise.

The scientist realizes that marriage, copulation, cohabitation, companionship, breeding and child rearing are all independent states or activities, not one of them nowadays necessarily linked to any other.

Uh-huh. I think marriage is better for a child's survival than abandoning him in the woods like a pagan. But please, Mr. Scientist, tell us why marriage is bad for reproduction and children, and will lead to the extinction of our species.

Saint Croix ... I think marriage is better for a child's survival than abandoning him in the woods...

Of course it is...family relevance is true among various animal species as well, such as wolves, meerkats, or elephants, by way of example. "Marriage" per se is merely the human means to acknowledge a family center. Wolves have a similar ritual in their Alpha/Alpha pairings...and they too exhibit infidelity now and then.

Our resident "scientist" expounds on subjects he knows nothing about. He might want to start with some actual field observations and learn from there. I recommend he study meerkat clans and the familial behaviors exhibited there. Or just spend some time in Yellowstone observing wolves and coyotes.